CentOS 5 end of life

Question

My server is running CentOS 5. The docs tell me that the "end of life" is March 31, 2017. Does this mean that the software will stop functioning on that date, or does it mean that there will no longer be any upgrades available for version 5? If the latter is true, what kind of difficulties could I expect to face, if I decide not to migrate to another server and OS?

Answer 1

In the software industry in general, "End-of-life" largely (but not always) means "End of support period" where "support" can mean different things - but generally it means these things simultaneously:

• The developers will not release any new patches or software updates for the product, this includes both feature updates, but more importantly also security updates. If you must run unsupported software then ensure it's suitably firewalled from the public Internet (and untrusted users) if not completely air-gapped.
• The developers will not go out of their way to provide personal technical support (e.g. phone support), however they still will generally keep self-service support resources (e.g. web-pages, knowledge-base articles, etc) available (Microsoft still has pages about Windows 2000 around somewhere).
• The developers/publishers are not obligated to provide access to this version of the software. Generally this doesn't happen as much with open-source software (as you can download the repo, rewind to an older version and build from source, but for commercial/proprietary software you will probably lose access to the formerly release binaries unless you retain your own copies.

Your concern about software suddenly stopping working after this end-of-life date is unfounded - at least in CentOS' case (as it's open-source software), and even proprietary software generally don't have timebombs in them (excepting time-limited trial versions of software, of course). The only thing to watch out for is software with an activation system, because after the supported-date period ends there is no guarantee the activation system will still work - this also applies to physical dongles too (while they won't immediately stop working, they might eventually fail) - in this case you'll want to contact the developers and negotiate a special build of the software with the activation features removed, or reverse-engineer the DRM to remove it (which may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction).